Tuesday, September 18, 2007

A little peek

Here's the happenings from this past weekend, along with a little peep of the future color of the house...

We got the sprayer up and running this weekend (YAY!) and spent the crisp fall Saturday and Sunday laying on two good coats of primer on all the surfaces on the west-facing side of the house. It took us a while to work the learning curve when it comes to operating the sprayer (warning--understatement.).

B got started Saturday morning by giving the kitchen another coat of mud. At about 5:30am. I managed to roll out of bed about 7-7:30, and blearily helped. After we got done, B pulled out the sprayer and began fiddling with it. Come to find out, the intake hose was allowing air into the line and not letting the machine build up pressure. Easily fixed with a trip to the Despot and a few bucks of plumbing supplies and some garden hose. It was about 1pm when B climbed up on the pump jack rig, sprayer in hand, and excitedly got started. After about five minutes up there he realized it was spewing out great globs. All over the deck. And porch. And hot tub. And yard. We had the brick part of the house papered/taped off and a little of the deck close to the house, but nowhere close to enough. It took us a couple of hours to scrub everything down and try to get as much as we could up. Sigh. Ah, well. We'll hopefully be borrowing a pressure washer and getting the poor deck cleaned up sometime soon, anyways.

We fiddled around with it more, and saw the nozzle was backwards. Once we got it turned around, things went a lot smoother.

At one point on Sunday, one of the pump jacks quit going down. It would go up, but wouldn't let him crank it down. B wrestled with it for about an hour trying to get it to go down again, but it took two of our neighbors and B climbing around on the rig like spider monkeys to figure out the mechanics of the boot. Finally: success! We finally got the last of the two coats of primer on the West side of the house done about 3pm on Sunday. We excitedly brought out the yellow paint bought last fall, but when I opened up the five gallon bucket, it was orange. Eeeeeep! I stared at it a while, plucked up the courage, and began mixing it up with a stir stick... It mellowed out to a lovely mango lassi color... a great golden orange, but not what I remembered from last year.

How did I choose that color, you ask? Here's the explanation. I bought a quart of yellow paint last fall, in anticipation for painting. I spent two days testing and taking this one quart of paint back to the Despot for "color adjustments." By the time I was happy with the color, there was a stack of stickers on the container, and the technician took one look at it, and told me it would be a lot easier to just color match the paint than to try to decipher all the numbers. Well, I went ahead and got the five gallons of color matched paint and didn't really think about it until I opened up the top of the bucket and saw the orange hue. Sigh.

Phew. We've definitely learned a lot. We've gone through about half of the five gallons of primer getting two good coats on the one side of the house. We've realized about 3/4 of the time "painting" is actually consumed by taping off areas, adjusting ladders, climbing up and down, and wrestling with pump jacks. There's very little "painting" involved in this process.

And here's a sneak peek... with a proper yellow tone bought Monday evening and the robin's egg blue soffits, a tribute to my family's homestead on the South Solomon River in Kansas. The porch ceilings at the ranch house are all painted robin's egg blue to ward off flies and mosquitoes. Even the trim is this color. I've also read it keeps birds from nesting in the eaves.

The next side will end up going loads quicker. Stay tuned, dearest ones. We'll give you some more of the goods as soon as we can.